Grass chicken with rice bag

When I came home on May Day, my mother grabbed a handful of rice bag grass and asked me to take it back and boil eggs to eat.

Rice bag grass is only in Zhuji dialect, and its scientific names are sad grass, sad leaves grass, sad power grass and Xiang Ling grass.

Rice bag grass is an annual herbaceous plant. Like moxa leaves, it grows from underground roots. The stems are smooth and the leaves look like peach leaves, but are much larger than them. The leaves have no hairs.

Rice bag grass has opposite leaves. The so-called opposite leaves mean that they grow facing each other on the same node.

I remember what my mother said to me: All plants with long leaves must be Chinese medicine. I keep this sentence firmly in mind. Whenever I see a plant with opposite leaves, I will ask my mother: Is this also a traditional Chinese medicine? What is it called? What is its use? After all, my mother didn't know much, so she would scold me, and in the end just ignore me.

I have been very interested in Chinese medicine since then, but unfortunately the environment was not right, otherwise I might have been a great master in the field of Chinese medicine, hahahaha...

Still Let’s talk about rice bag grass. Rice bag grass is a very easy plant to grow. I remember that in my hometown, every household would plant a few clusters in front of and behind the house. There are really only a few clusters. The rice bag grass grows in groups and will appear in clusters in the spring.

Whenever the family members lose their appetite or energy, my mother will grab a handful of fresh rice-bread grass, chop it into pieces and boil the eggs, mix it with a few bowls of water and boil it. The quiet scent of grass comes to your face. If you eat it at night, you will have a great appetite the next morning and your whole body will be full of strength.

Rice grass can not only be eaten fresh, but can also be dried and used in winter.

So I call the rice bag grass "San Miguang grass". Compared with the sad grass and hurt grass, San Miguel grass seems to be more appropriate, don't you think so?

Every year on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, my mother got up early, went to the sweet-scented osmanthus tree in the yard of the old house, and used a sickle to cut a lot of rice bag grass, then washed and chopped it, and mixed it with eggs. Together, add water to the stew pot and start stewing the rice-wrapped chicken on the briquette stove.

Stewing rice with chicken eggs is actually very simple. Just put it on the stove and simmer it slowly, take more time, crack the eggshells when the eggs are cooked, and then continue to simmer until the rice is wrapped in rice. Just cook the grass flavor into the egg whites or even the egg yolks.

The eggshells of my mother’s stewed rice-breaded chickens were dyed green, and the protein inside was only wisps of green, and not much of the rice-breaded grass flavor was absorbed.

Every time my father eats rice-wrapped chicken, he will nag my mother for not cooking it thoroughly enough. My father says that the white of the rice-wrapped chicken cooked by grandma looks black, and it is full of the smell of rice-wrapped chicken. I don't think my father is dissatisfied with my mother's poor cooking, but he is thinking about things and people.

Probably the deepest memory of everyone is the delicious food cooked by their mother.

Nowadays, I often think of the delicacies I ate when I was a child, and even get so greedy that I stubbornly want to eat them again, just like this rice-wrapped chicken.

On Friday night, I spent several hours stewing chicken with rice and grass. The house was filled with the special fragrance of rice and grass, which made me feel appetizing. When the child got home, I served him two eggs and a cup of hawthorn rock sugar water. I felt very happy when I watched him finish it in a few seconds!

I think that maybe when the child grows up, or even old, he will always remember this taste, just like a father remembers the rice dumplings cooked by his grandma, which is the taste of his mother.

Food conveys a kind of love, which can be found nowhere else...

Postscript:

Posted the picture in a small group of classmates, which attracted a lot of attention. The classmate's inquiry triggered the deep memory of Fanbao Caojizi, and he wrote these words based on his memories.